Hey guys. Since i've seen many people on the forum use the USM in photoshop. I think you might want to know a really good trick. (maybe you already know). But here it goes.

This goal of this trick. Is to only sharpen the things that need tobe sharpened. And NOT to sharpen the noise.

First you open a picture in photoshop. The best test is a photo with short DOF so the background is all blurry. In the layer window, you select another tab -> channels. There you find 4 channels. The mixed RGB (red green blue). And the three seperate channels. If you click on of them you see a b/w image. You need to select the channel which has the most detail on the subject, and the less detail in the noise. Mostly.. this is the green channel... sometimes blue with landscapes.. or red in portraits. But its never certain. Always check

Now you duplicate the chosen channel. Photoshop ask you want to name the channel.. just press ok. Then the layer will be named -> ***** copy

Be sure to have the **** copy layer selected.
Now, on the top-bar of the screen, go to filters -> stylize -> find edges.

Now you picture should look something like this

You can see that the edges are black and non-contrast parts are white.

Now, you click the **** copy layer with CONTROL + LEFT MOUSE BUTTON.
Now it will select the image if it were an alpha channel.

Only it selects the lighter parts of the image so we need to inverse the selection.
CTRL+SHIFT+i , or selection->inverse.

your selection should look like this

You can see it only has edges selected, and not the (barely noticable) noisy background. Actually it has selected te background a little bit, but so small you can't see the selection. To be absolutely sure to not blow up any noise, you could use the lasso tool to deselect the background, I often don't do that.

Now we can use the unsharp mask. - > filters -> sharpen -> unsharp mask.

I can't tell you the best setting for your picture, but this picture came out best with this setting ->

I hope you understand everything. Ifthere are any questions just PM me :G

I gave this a try and it was very easy to do. Your tutorial is excellent. I tried it and did a few in different color channels and got excellent results. I now know how you got your great pictures to look that much better.